*That's more often rendered, by Powell's nephew, Ferdinand Mount, as well as by Christopher Hitchens, as Powell expressing interest in a hypothetical Burke's of Bank Clerks, a more entertaining formulation.

Notes to "Anthony Powell on Aubrey, far from 'bloody boring.'"

*Right before Wood died, on November 28, 1695, of "a Total Suppression of the Urine," his acquaintance Robert South made the cruel and unforgettable crack that "if he could not make water he would have to make earth." Powell, while finding convincingly in Aubrey's favor in their quarrel, is carefuly to give Wood his due. He was

an unhappy, unhealthy, malicious, frustrated old man; but one to whom all 'pretenders to antiquity' owe a great debt. . . . He was not, on the whole, an attractive figure, but he did not lack qualities of courage and perseverance. . . . Aubrey had found in him something that was intensely sympathetic, and Wood is yet another instance in the strange annals of friendship of the unlikely human beings who can inspire deep affection.

It's that very openness to difference, to oddity, that animates A Dance to the Music of Time

Notes to "In a movie theater at least you can hold hands."

* Another: Archie can be seen--if it's possible to conceive this--as a smart, competent Bertie Wooster, while Nero Wolfe could be seen as--again, if it can even be conceived--more confident Jeeves . . . who has turned the tables on Bertie and is, rightly, giving the damn orders himself. ** On this front Sue Grafton deserves to be celebrated. She published her first Kinsey Millhone novel, A is for Alibi, in 1982, and, as she's progressed through the alphabet in her titles, she's deliberately allowed time to get away from her, telling Sarah Weinman in 2009 that Z (is for . . .) would coincide with Kinsey's fortieth birthday in 1990. (Side note to a side note: I've long thought that the Marvel Universe--so incredibly innovative when it appeared fifty years ago--could have been even more amazing had it been able to figure out a way to allow its characters to age. Peter Parker reached his late twenties (maybe early thirties) and stopped; Reed Richards and Tony Stark their forties. Imagine a world where we were in the third or fourth generation of Marvel heroes, where Peter Parker was nearing seventy, Bruce Banner eighty--yet still Hulk-powered, Professor X long dead not through malice but age, Doctor Strange but a powerful memory to his legion of mentees . . . )

Notes to Best head buyer for the Invisible Library: Robert Bolano

* I've had to at least consider Walt Whitman for the title of Least Desirable Literature Professor. It would be sort of like studying combat--or, worse, willpower--with the Batman. What is he going to say, "Just do like I do"?

Notes to Round and round with Hardy and James

* A note to the volume points out that Stevenson mistakenly dated the letter 1891, for which James gently corrected him, writing to "My dear distant Louis" that he envied "my time-deluded islander" for being "so luxuriously 'out'."

** I'm looking at you, Stieg Larsson.

*** All these seem right to me except Conrad. Am I forgetting scenes of humor in Conrad? Lord knows, I've not read nearly all his books, but what comes to mind is a grim determination verging on dourness. Am I missing something?

Notes to "This is not so much the first over, as a gentle limbering up," or, Embarking on the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters

*Wait--there are published notebooks of Hardy? Yes, yes, it turns out that there are. I'll be getting those.

Notes to The story, the forest, the chain of transmission

* How pleasing that the man who--though in this paragraph simply credited with naming the wildwood--was one of the scientists who placed the forest's clearance much earlier than generally thought shares a name with Arthur Rackham, one of the greatest illustrators of the creatures of forest, fairie, and fantasy!

Notes to Chess

*Despite the fact that Dunnett lets the move-by-move narration go after four or five moves--which, as I had been sketching out the moves as they happened, super-nerd-style, disappointed me immensely--I have not a whit of doubt that she had, in her files somewhere, the log of the entire game. Meticulous doesn't even begin to describe Dunnett's approach to detail. God, I wish there were any other writer quite like her.

Notes to I know where to hide those ludes!, or, Place-based boredom

*The outer limits of conceivable eternity at that point being, say, the sixteen years (and scraggly mustache) to which your REO Speedwagon–t-shirted neighbor had attained.

Notes to The English Ghost

* I can use these words that way without mixing metaphors, right? "Magpie" plays the role of an adjective, modifying "archive mouse"? Work with me here, people.

Notes to Through gates of horn and ivory, or, Entering the realm of the Oneiroi

*

Notes to Fitzgerald's beautiful and damned. In both senses of that apostrophe.

8 And that's only the first of a dismayingly large number of playlets, a mistake forgivable in a first novelist who feels omnipotent, far less so in a novelist submitting himself to the public a second time. I know This Side of Paradise was a success, but wasn't there any carping? Any criticism that might have buffeted Fitzgerald just enough to make him draw in his wings a tad?

Notes to Harry Mathews and the productive pleasure of constraints

* When I was six, I wrote two songs: "Horses are Fun" and "Horseshoes on the Sidewalk." The latter was a sad song, in a minor key.

Notes to Surprises, pleasant

* This category overlaps significantly with the category of books I find myself reading aloud from to rocketlass. The Book of Freaks had a strong showing in that category, but it's going to be tough for anything this year to top Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia. No matter what he's writing about, Frazier's work begs to be read aloud, and his Siberia book--because it's about Russia, and Russia is crazy--has something worth sharing on nearly every one of its 500-plus pages.

rocketlass is remarkably tolerant.

Notes to Peace, but not the world's peace, or, Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede

* It turns out that Jo Walton is a fan, too.

** The Abbess, far from cruel but wholly dedicated to her task of keeping Brede's sisters to their vow of poverty--and keeping their attention on heavenly things--even forbids them to keep the rapidly burgeoning family of cats that lives on the grounds. They may keep two, newly spayed; the kittens, initially condemned to drowning, are saved by the extern sisters, the affiliate nuns who go out into the world on errands, and who, in this case, rapidly find homes on local farms for all the kittens.

The medieval volume of guidance for enclosed orders Ancrene Wisse has some amusingly strident things to say about cats and other animals:

My dear sisters, unless need drives you and your director advises it, you must not have any animal except a cat. An anchoress who has animals seems more like a housewife than Martha was; she cannot easily be Mary, Martha's sister, with peace in her heart. For then she has to think of the cow's food, of the herdsman's hire; to flatter the bailiff, curse him when he impounds it, and pay the damages anyway. It is a hateful thing, Christ knows, when people in a town complain about an anchoress's animals. Now then, if anyone has to have one, see that it does not bother or harm anyone, and that her thought is in no way fastened on it. An anchoress ought to have nothing that draws her heart outward.

Is it just me, or are there hints of Sei Shonagon's peremptiveness in that passage?

Notes to Casanova and Don Juan

* Does this still hold, even in Tournier's native Europe? Though I know the name of Don Juan still has currency, it's hard to imagine adolescent American teenage males, as they adjust their backwards baseball caps and sing along to their Nickelback MP3s, thinking of themselves as Don Juans.

** Am I wrong to think that, however illogical this might be, Casanova would be slightly easier to defend (or enjoy without guilt) were there a female Casanova as well? I realize that 1) Casanova truly was singular, and that imagining another, of any gender, is a silly exercise, and 2) the lack of a female Casanova is in a sense, the point; that life was an option for a man, not for a woman. Maybe the Empress Theodora could be our admittedly inadequate stand-in?

Notes to Time, change, and the King

* Why Christine? It was recommended by a King-fan coworker. I told her that I'd read these--
Salem's Lot
Night Shift
The Stand
Danse Macabre
It
The Tommyknockers
Eyes of the Dragon
Needful Things
Four Past Midnight
Different Seasons
On Writing
The Colorado Kid
Lisey's Story
Under the Dome-and asked what she thought I should pick up next. (The obvious answer is The Shining, but that's just too scary. I read twenty pages once, just like I saw ten minutes of the movie once, and I couldn't deal.) I was skeptical about Christine, because the premise is just so ridiculous, but she was right that it wouldn't take many pages before I gave up my disbelief.

Notes to And so we bid the ghosts adieu, or, See you in the stacks!

"The Ghost of Doctor Harris," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in The Living Age on February 1o, 1900

In the year 1856 Nathaniel Hawthorne was American Consul at Liverpool. There he made many friends and acquaintances. He was an honored and weicome guest at the house of the late Mr. John Pemberton Heywood, well known in Liverpool as one of its most prosperous and respected citizens. Here it was that Hawthorne met Henry Bright (a nephew of Mrs. Heywood), who became one of his most intimate friends, and to whom he wrote many letters, some of which were published in his life.

It once happened that, when dining with the Heywoods, Hawthorne related his own personal experience of a ghost. The story was thought so remarkable by Mrs. Heywood that she begged him to write it down for her. With this request he complied. The manuscript is now in the possession of Mrs. Heywood's sister, the Honorable Mrs. Richard Denman, who kindly allows its publication.
--A. M. Wilberforce

I am afraid this ghost story will bear a very faded aspect when transferred to paper. Whatever effect it had on you, or whatever charm it retains in your memory, is, perhaps, to be attributed to the favorable circumstances under which it was originally told.

We were sitting, I remember, late in the evening in your drawing-room, where the lights of the chandelier were so muffled as to produce a delicious obscurity, through which the fire diffused a dim, red glow. In this rich twilight the feelings of the party had been properly attuned by some tales of English superstition, and the lady of Smithhills Hall had just been describing that Bloody Footstep which marks the threshold of her old mansion, when your Yankee guest (zealous for the honor of his country, and desirous of proving that his dead compatriots have the same ghostly privileges as other dead people, if they think it worth while to use them) began a story of something wonderful that long ago happened to himself. Possibly in the verbal narrative he may have assumed a little more license than would be allowable in a written record. For the sake of the artistic effect, he may then have thrown in, here and there, a few slight circumstances which he will not think it proper to retain in what he now puts forth as the sober statement of a veritable fact.

A good many years ago (it must be as many as fifteen, perhaps more, and while I was still a bachelor) I resided at Boston, in the United States. In that city there is a large and well-established library, styled the Athenaeum, connected with which is a reading-room, well supplied with foreign and American periodicals and newspapers. A splendid edifice has since been erected by the proprietors of the institution; but, at the period I speak of, it was contained within a large, old mansion, formerly the town residence of an eminent citizen of Boston. The reading-room (a spacious hall, with the group of the Laocoon at one end and the Belvidere Apollo at the other) was frequented by not a few elderly merchants, retired from business, by clergymen and lawyers, and by such literary men as we had amongst us. These good people were mostly old, leisurely, and somnolent, and used to nod and doze for hours together, with the newspapers before them—ever and anon recovering themselves so far as to read a word or two of the politics of the day—sitting as it were on the boundary of the Land of Dreams, and having little to do with this world, except through the newspapers which they so tenaciously grasped.

One of these worthies whom I occasionally saw there was the Reverend Doctor Harris, a Unitarian clergyman of considerable repute and eminence. He was very far advanced in life, not less than eighty years old, and probably more; and he resided, I think, at Dorchester—a suburban village in the immediate vicinity of Boston. I had never been personally acquainted with this good old clergyman, but had heard of him all my life as a noteworthy man; so that, when he was first pointed out to me, I looked at him with a certain specialty of attention, and always subsequently eyed him with a degree of interest whenever I happened to see him at the Athenaeum or elsewhere. He was a small, withered, infirm, but brisk old gentleman, with snow-white hair, a somewhat stooping figure, but yet a remarkable alacrity of movement. I remember it was in the street that I first noticed him. The Doctor was plodding along with a staff, but turned smartly about on being addressed by the gentleman who was with me, and responded with a good deal of vivacity.

"Who is he?" I inquired, as soon as he had passed.

"The Reverend Doctor Harris, of Dorchester," replied my companion; and from that time I often saw him, and never forgot his aspect. His especial haunt was the Athenaeum. There I used to see him daily, and almost always with a newspaper—the Boston Post, which was the leading journal of the Democratic party in the northern states. As old Doctor Harris had been a noted Democrat during his more active life, it was a very natural thing that he should still like to read the Boston Post. There his reverend figure was accustomed to sit day after day, in the self-same chair by the fireside; and, by degrees, seeing him there so constantly, I began to look towards him as I entered the reading room, and felt that a kind of acquaintance, at least on my part, was established. Not that I had any reason (as long as this venerable person remained in the body) to suppose that he ever noticed me; but by some subtle connection this small, white-haired, infirm, yet vivacious figure of an old clergyman became associated with my idea and recollection of the place. One day especially (about noon, as was generally his hour) I am perfectly certain that I had seen this figure of old Doctor Harris, and taken my customary note of him, although I remember nothing in his appearance at all different from what I had seen on many previous occasions.

But that very evening a friend said to me:

"Did you hear that old Doctor Harris is dead?"

"No," said I, very quietly, "and it cannot be true; for I saw him at the Athenaeum to-day."

"You must be mistaken," rejoined my friend. "He is certainly dead!" and confirmed the fact with such special circumstances that I could no longer doubt it.

My friend has often since assured me that I seemed much startled at the intelligence; but, as well as I can recollect, I believe that I was very little disturbed, if at all, but set down the apparition as a mistake of my own, or, perhaps, the interposition of a familiar idea into the place and amid the circumstances with which I had been accustomed to associate it.

The next day as I ascended the steps of the Athenaeum, I remember thinking within myself, "Well, I shall never see old Doctor Harris again!" With this thought in my mind, as I opened the door of the reading-room, I glanced towards the spot and chair where Doctor Harris usually sat, and there, to my astonishment, sat the gray, infirm figure of the deceased Doctor, reading the newspaper as was his wont! His own death must have been recorded, that very morning, in that very newspaper! I have no recollection of being greatly discomposed at the moment, nor indeed that I felt any extraordinary emotion whatever. Probably, if ghosts were in the habit of coming among us, they would coincide with the ordinary train of affairs, and melt into them so familiarly that we should not be shocked at their presence. At all events, so it was in this instance. I looked through the newspapers as usual, and turned over the periodicals, taking about as much interest in their contents as at other times. Once or twice, no doubt, I may have lifted my eyes from the page to look again at the venerable Doctor, who ought then to have been lying in his coffin dressed out for the grave, but who felt such interest in the Boston Post as to come back from the other world to read it the morning after his death. One might have supposed that he would have cared more about the novelties of the sphere to which he had just been introduced than about the politics he had left behind him!

The apparition took no notice of me, nor behaved otherwise in any respect than on any previous day. Nobody but myself seemed to notice him; and yet the old gentlemen round about the fire beside his chair were his lifelong acquaintances, who were, perhaps, thinking of his death, and who, in a day or two, would deem it a proper courtesy to attend his funeral.

I have forgotten how the ghost of Doctor Harris took its departure from the Athenaeum on this occasion, or, in fact, whether the ghost or I went first. This equanimity, and almost indifference, on my part—the careless way in which I glanced at so singular a mystery and left it aside—is what now surprises me as much as anything else in the affair.

From that time for a long while thereafter—for weeks, at least, and I know not but for months—I used to see the figure of Doctor Harris quite as frequently as before his death. It grew to be so common that at length I regarded the venerable defunct no more than any other of the old fogies who basked before the fire, and dozed over the newspapers.

It was but a ghost—nothing but thin air—not tangible nor appreciable, nor demanding any attention from a man of flesh and blood! I cannot recollect any cold shudderings, any awe, any repugnance, any emotion whatever, such as would be suitable and decorous on beholding a visitant from the spiritual world. It is very strange, but such is the truth. It appears excessively odd to me now that I did not adopt such means as I readily might to ascertain whether the appearance had solid substance, or was merely gaseous and vapory. I might have brushed against him, have jostled his chair, or have trodden accidentally on his poor old toes. I might have snatched the Boston Post—unless that were an apparition, too—out of his shadowy hands. I might have tested him in a hundred ways; but I did nothing of the kind.

Perhaps I was loth to destroy the illusion, and to rob myself of so good a ghost story, which might probably have been explained in some very commonplace way. Perhaps, after all, I had a secret dread of the old phenomenon, and therefore kept within my limits, with an instinctive caution which I mistook for indifference. Be that as it may, here is the fact. I saw the figure, day after day, for a considerable space of time, and took no pains to ascertain whether it was a ghost or no. I never, to my knowledge, saw him come into the reading-room or depart from it. There satDoctor Harris in his customary chair, and I can say little else about him.

After a certain period—I really know not how long—I began to notice, or to fancy, a peculiar regard in the old gentleman's aspect towards myself. I sometimes found him gazing at me, and, unless I deceived myself, there was a sort of expectancy in his face. His spectacles, I think, were shoved up, so thait his bleared eyes might meet my own. Had he been a living man I should have flattered myself that good Doctor Harris was, for some reason or other, interested in me and desirous of a personal acquaintance. Being a ghost, and amenable to ghostly laws, it was natural to conclude that he was waiting to be spoken to before delivering whatever message he had to impart. But, if so, the ghost had shown the bad judgment common among the spiritual brotherhood, both as regarded the place of interview and the person whom he had selected as the recipient of his communications. In the reading-room of the Athenaeum conversation is strictly forbidden, and I could not have addressed the apparition without drawing the instant notice and indignant frowns of the slumbrous old gentlemen around me. I myself, too, at that time, was as shy as any ghost, and followed the ghosts' rule never to speak first. And what an absurd figure should I have made, solemnly and awfully addressing what must have appeared in the eyes of all the rest of the company an empty chair! Besides, I had never been introduced to Doctor Harris, dead or alive, and I am not aware that social regulations are to be abrogated by the accidental fact of one of the parties having crossed the imperceptible line which separates the other party from the spiritual world. If ghosts throw off all conventionalism among themselves, it does not, therefore, follow that it can safely be dispensed with by those who are still hampered with flesh and blood.

For such reasons as these—and reflecting, moreover, that the deceased Doctor might burden me with some disagreeable task, with which I had no business or wish to be concerned—I stubbornly resolved to have nothing to say to him. To this determination I adhered; and not a syllable ever passed between the ghost of Doctor Harris and myself.

To the best of my recollection I never observed the old gentleman either enter the reading-room or depart from it, or move from his chair, or lay down the newspaper, or exchange a look with any person in the company, unless it were myself. He was not by any means invariably in his place. In the evening, for instance, though often at the reading-room myself, I never saw him. It was at the brightest noontide that I used to behold him, sitting within the most comfortable focus of the glowing fire, as real and lifelike an object (except that he was so very old.
and of an ashen complexion) as any other in the room. After a long while of this strange intercourse, if such it can be called, I remember—once, at least, and I know not but oftener—a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze, which the ghost fixed upon me from beneath his spectacles; a melancholy look of helplessness, which, if my heart had not been as hard as a paving-stone, I could hardly have withstood. But I did withstand it; and I think I saw him no more after this last appealing look, which still dwells in my memory as perfectly as while my own eyes were encountering the dim and bleared eyes of the ghost. And whenever I recall this strange passage of my life, I see the small, old, withered figure of Doctor Harris, sitting in his accustomed chair, the Boston Post in his hand, his spectacles shoved upwards—and gazing at me, as I close the door of the reading-room, with that wistful, appealing, hopeless, helpless look. It is too late now; his grave has been grass-grown this many and many a year; and I hope he has found rest in it without any aid from me.

I have only to add that it was not until long after I had ceased to encounter the ghost that I became aware how very odd and strange the whole affair had been; and even now I am made sensible of its strangeness chiefly by the wonder and incredulity of those to whom I tell the story.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Liverpool, August 17, 1856

Notes to Virginia Woolf on Henry James's ghost stories, or, "Surely there are facts enough in the world to go round."

* Bible-steeped unbeliever that I am, I can't help but hear in that phrase echoes--so distant as surely to be unintentional--of Jesus's promise to his disciples in Matthew 18:20, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." Where'er the significant o'erflows our powers of understanding, there . . . something is. In the best of horror, or even more gentle supernatural writing, the one thing we know about that something is that it sure isn't holy.

Notes to Shelving and Sorting

1 The Way It Wasn't, by James Laughton, page 147

2 Fantastic Mr. Fox, by Roald Dahl, page 30

3 Seven Types of Ambiguity, by William Empson, page 194

4 The Pritchett Century, by V. S. Pritchett, page 168

5 The Journal, 1837–1861, by Henry David Thoreau, page 300

6 Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon, page 140